Whisky Van Gogh Go

FaceTime and the widening gap

Back when the iPod With Video debuted, a tech blogger — who was notable for his coverage of non-iPod audio players and bias — was at a trade show talking to a representative (probably Samsung) about the new features of their latest iPod-killer*. The rep explained all the ways that their unit matched last year’s iPod Nano, so the blogger asked about their plans for video and the newly announced iTunes Movie Store.

The representative was at a loss for words, and the blogger realized that the competition was stuck in a one-year-plus cycle of catch-up with no sign of shortening the gap. His next post** was a screed explaining why he was giving up and buying an iPod.

- - -

FaceTime. We knew videochat was coming, but we assumed it would take the form of Video iChat, not a new protocol. But this makes sense. Video iChat is dependent on AIM, and it works like crap on wonky routers. Video iChat doesn’t always Just Work (a good motto for the iPodPhoneTouchPad, er, iOS platform).

And they’re publishing an open spec, too, which is necessary because an iPhone that can’t do videocalls to non-iPhones would be as lame as an iPhone that can’t voicecall non-iPhones. Will the “Apple likes closed platforms” folks notice?

- - -

Today you can buy a non-iPhone that has a front-facing camera, but it won’t do FaceTime (and probably doesn’t do videochat at all).

You can wait until summer 2011 to buy an Android with a frontcam and FaceTime.

You can wait until Christmas 2011 to buy a Windows Series 7 Mobile CE Phone with a frontcam and FaceTime.

Or you can be using an iPhone 4 with FaceTime, that Just Works***, in three weeks.

- - -

* “iPod Killer” is now in the history books next to “unsinkable Titanic,” soon to be joined by “papal infallibility”

** Google failing me, going on memory

*** caveat: over Wifi; that’s gotta be pissing off Steve like whoa

Retina Display? alright fine

I hate bullshit marketing terms. Like, it’s just a DVD burner, do we really have to call it a “Superdrive”? What happens when that’s obsolete, we upgrade to Superduperdrives? I get “Retina Display” though.

Now I’ve been obsessing over higher-resolution computer displays for years. PC users have enjoyed 130+ppi laptops for ages; until just a couple months ago only the highest-end Macbooks got them. It appears that Apple has been waiting until they could add “resolution-independence” features to the Mac OS, so the screen resolution could get higher but screen contents would remain the same size and smoother (unfortunate for those of us who find the buttons too large already). A resolution-independent UI was first promised as a feature for 10.4, then postponed to 10.5, and they didn’t pretend that it would be ready for Snow Leopard.

Existing attempts at resolution-independence take the form of scaling applications, and you can even play with it right now. But bugs abound; scaling is a kludge.

I think Apple has come to the conclusion that incremental increases in screen resolution and app scaling are a waste of effort, and are instead picking a simple standard — and that’s what “Retina Display” really means. No resolution-independence, no scaling, just a fixed standard where an inch is 326 pixels and any better would be pointless so let’s call it a day and move on. I’m betting that this standard starts on the iPhone, will probably be part of iPad 2, and will come to Macs with 10.7. Legacy apps would of course operate in a pixel-tripled mode, similar to iPhone apps on the iPad.

It’s easier to sell to consumers. “High-res iMacs” are relative and meaningless to the layperson. “New iMacs with Retina Display” are a selling point.

So I had to load an IE6 virtual machine (Win2k) just to check if Google Pac-Man would work. And it does! Swimmingly!

Not only that, but it seemed to be running much smoother than on Chrome or Safari. Spent a few seconds scratching my head… and also noticed that there was no sound because I hadn’t installed Flash in order to keep the VM “lean.”

So, to clarify: Flash impairs browsers to the point where IE6 is outperforming all the SquirrelTraceFishMonkeyV8 awesomeness that folks spent the past ten years working on. Perhaps that’s a gross oversimplification, and we’d need a proper HTML 5 <audio> version in order to benchmark. But still, whoa.

Fun times in my home state

Phoenix Suns wear “Los Suns” jerseys for Game 2

and now I’m twice as excited about Rodriguez’s Planet Terror follow-up. Happy Cinco!

Just caught this little zinger on Thurrot’s blog:

Here’s a screenshot of the new Google Docs:

Just kidding :)

Pretty cute. Also reminded me of last week, when I had to print something at FedExKinkoCorp faced Office 2007 for the first time:

Seriously, how the hell do you print from this? Or even open a file?* Google Docs is not a step backward from Office 2007.

(* I accidentally came across these answers several days later)

iPhone OS multitasking rumors

I don’t buy it.

So many barely-released iPad apps would get dragged back to the drawing board to take advantage of it. Releasing such a huge change now would be akin to releasing iPhone OS 3 just six weeks after v2. The time to get the ball rolling on this would have been before the iPad launch, not after.

The closest we might see would be something wherein a running app, when told to “shut down,” would have a snapshot taken of its RAM state and written to the internal flash storage — which could then be reloaded and be seamlessly resumed.

This isn’t new. OS X already does something similar system-wide when it “hibernates.” Emulators like MAME and SNES9x have been able to do it for years (the virtual machine nature of emulators probably makes it particularly easy). Windows CE Mobile Series Phone 7 is going to have it. I’m a little puzzled by why it hasn’t been part of the iPhone OS all along.

Best of all, it could probably be managed without any additional work from developers; perhaps just a flag in the info.plist file.

No background processing for third party apps, though.

—-

Other guesses/wishlist for OS 4:

• Mail overhaul with unified inbox
• Apple iChat for iPhone with front-face camera support
• User-definable information on the “lock” screen — see stopwatches and timers, weather, etc. at a glance
• A legible typeface for Notes

It makes a lot more sense if you look at it this way:

The iPad is not a big iPod Touch. The iPod Touch is a pocket-sized iPad.

addendum, Steve Jobs, June 2010: I’ll tell you a secret. It actually started with the tablet first. I had this idea about having a glass display, a multitouch display you could type on with your fingers. I asked our folks: could we come up with a multitouch display that we could type on? And six months later, they came back with this prototype display. And I gave it to one of our really brilliant UI guys and he called me back a few weeks later and had intertial scrolling working and I thought, ‘my God, we can build a phone with this!’ So we put the tablet on the shelf… and we went to work on the iPhone.

A conversation happening right now

“Gentlemen: should we make Office for the iPad.”

“Nobody’s going to type their resume on a touchscreen.”

“Two words: keyboard dock. And when someone makes a case with a flip-out keyboard, I mean, shit dawg.”

“Regardless: it would legitimize and strengthen the platform. We should not.”

“The iPod didn’t need any legitimizing from us. And it proved that our file format can be dominant on 99% of the models in a particular market, but if all the sales go to the other 1%, it’s completely irrelevant. Anyway the ongoing dominance of Office is dependent on its availability on all mainstream computing platforms.”

“Then we should get to work on it.”

“There is no way that it can get done in under two years. iWork is on it today. For $10.”

“Then we had better hope the tablet division is successful in getting that… foldy thing done. I’m sure it won’t take as long to launch as our iPhone-killer, and I’m equally sure it will be equally superior to the iPad.”

“Wait, the foldy-thing is real? I thought it was a doodle someone threw together with no real intention of producing.”

“That’s what your mom said.”

“Touché. When’s the launch?”

“I dunno, ask someone from the Xbox division. What do we do about the iPad in the meantime?”

“LA LA LA LA LA”

So die a little longer

I’m having a Douglas Coupland Moment. Bear with me.

This is a new Verizon commercial. It’s been airing on Hulu (and presumably on television sets).

This is a clever commercial. There have been countless thousands of ads that have pilloried old movies and music and cultural memes, but the only other example of a commercial aping a commercial that I can recall is the Energizer Bunny — and that was more of a game of one upsmanship. This feels like a tribute. And “big red” is a pretty good nickname for a corporation that is in desperate need of a personality.

And it’s funny, too. You’ll watch YouTube on a horse… Needless to say the jingle has been stuck in my head for days.

But something strange happened. I started to get a little angry whenever I heard caught myself humming it. Not just because it was the first commercial I had paid any attention to in what feels like years. I felt that self-righteous indignation that you’ll overhear someone spout every time a new movie is announced: “How dare they rape my childhood?” Which is such a bullshit response — the producers of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs did not board a time machine to lure your seven-year-old ass into an ice cream truck (I would totally pay to see that movie) — but there it is.

Really, I had no idea that I harbored any sentimental feelings toward this ad. But it’s so cute! So innocently romantic! How dare those clods at Verizon appropriate this piece of vintage eighties Americana to sell their crappy third-rate phones?

I’m sure that in 2040 some jerk will be complaining about Bioglorp appropriating that classic 2010 Verizon ad to sell their genepak olfactory upgrades.

Incidentally I’m pretty sure that I’ve never bought a pack of Big Red gum in my life.

rstevens:

mckelvie:

T. Roosevelt: The Square Deal
F. Roosevelt: The New Deal
H. Truman: The Fair Deal
B. Obama: The Big Fucking Deal

…works for me.

-Jamais Cascio.

Ebert Part 2

Roger Ebert’s second act as a Twitter superstar and Internet luminary has been enormously gratifying to witness. 

I first realized that Ebert was more than a simple critic when I watched Dark City on DVD with his commentary track turned on. It was already one of my favorite movies in years; his insights took it to the next level.

Apparently Murdock lives in room 614 because the screenwriter was in 614 when he wrote the movie, but it can’t be denied that there’s some connection with the fact that Murdock’s first name is ‘John’ and that in John 6:14 you find a verse that’s about the coming of a prophet or a savior.

pictured: Roger Ebert — equipped with awesome cyborg voice collar — explains memes

Most DVD commentaries amount to the director telling some boring anecdotes about the production — oh, this was filmed in a real shopping mall? and they had to shut down business for 3 days and populate it with extras? huh. The Ebert track is like sitting in on a college film course led by the coolest teacher you’ve ever had. 

Fantasy: Ebert could start a second career out of “classes” like this. He wouldn’t even need the studios’ participation: they could be recorded as downloadable podcasts and synced for playback a la Rifftrax or Wizard People Dear Reader.